Where To, Chicago? Let`s Get Some Reforms On The Road -- And Step On It

January 12, 1986|By Bill Granger.

It never occurred to me that the Immigration and Naturalization Service could be used as a weapon to fight organized rudeness, malice, incompetence and idiocy on the part of a contingent of Chicago cab drivers who mostly work for the Yellow and Checker companies.

A recent raid on cab drivers by federal agents led to the arrest of 129 folks, some of whom (officials disagree on the numbers) are residing illegally in the city, stealing a living from citizens and profiting from the near monopoly on cab licenses held by Checker Motors Corp.

Checker operates all those Checker and Yellow cabs you see waiting in line at O`Hare airport to take you downtown, and if you don`t want to go downtown, you can go to hell.

The head of Checker is against this kind of enforcement of immigration laws against his drivers for the simple reason that Checker makes its money up front when the driver leases one of the licensed cabs for a day.

Checker is not in the business of providing services; it is in the business of leasing cabs. The driver could turn out to be a gorilla and it probably wouldn`t matter to anyone in City Hall who approves licenses or to anyone who leases cabs.

Everyone knows that City Hall doesn`t care who drives city cabs or what level of service is provided both to residents of the city and those important conventioneers and businessmen who fly into O`Hare each day. Chicago probably has the rudest, most hateful and incompetent corps of airport cabbies in the country--and I base that on having used cabs in more than 30 cities in the last five years.

Who should care about this?

You would think the decent, hard-working and knowledgeable cab drivers would care, but they don`t say a word.

You might think that the cab company owners would be farsighted enough to care, because the day is coming when the various livery services that operate cleanly, reasonably and courteously in the city and suburbs are going to drive cab use to O`Hare down to near nil.

You might think the various businesses with a stake in good airport cab service--the hotels, the various associations of commerce and industry, the restaurateurs--might care, but there is scarcely a peep.

Even the airline companies, which have a stake in an efficient operation at O`Hare, seem not to notice how abysmal taxicab service is at the World`s Busiest.

Obviously, the mayor doesn`t care. He trots the globe these days, but he gets limousine service to O`Hare. I wonder if he`s forgotten what it`s like to live in Hyde Park and be black (as he does and is) and try to get any cabbie to take you home day or night? That`s what being mayor can do for you

--insulate you from real life.

It happened to Jane Byrne, who made her political reputation on her vow to reform the cab business in Chicago and make it work.

As soon as she got her mayoral limousine, she forgot about the cabs with greasy seats, drivers who like to bully women passengers and all the commonplaces of life in The Third City.

The INS seems an unlikely arm of intrusion into a local problem, but if it works, it seems like a good idea.

The mayor will be against it, of course, because his stated public policy is not to cooperate with the INS in finding illegal aliens working in Chicago, because they are part of his constituency. The mayor favors those who steal American jobs over those who are just regular old tax-paying, voting Americans.

It is an interesting political position adopted by some other Democratic mayors and seems part of the complex death wish that has gripped the Donkeycrats since the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

It is instructive that a recent column on bad cab service at O`Hare struck a responsive chord with a number of women readers, who wrote to tell me of their anger and frustration in trying to get cabs from O`Hare to their homes.

The ladies recounted instances of bullying, humiliation and general sexual intimidation by drivers. Perhaps reform of the cab service at O`Hare might come from a splinter of the Democratic Party highly ignored by Harold Washington and his cohorts. I speak of the women`s movement.

The movement has flaked off in recent years into advocacy of abortion

(and woe betide a woman who might be liberated and yet still be against abortion) and into pushing Geraldine Ferraro`s whiny approach to politics down our throats.

But it still has muscle and coherency for some genuine issues, such as equal rights, equal job opportunity and sexual discrimination in all facets of American life.

Could the ladies locally focus a bit on how badly women are treated by cabbies at O`Hare? Especially at night, especially when they are alone, especially when they do not want to go to the Loop?

I have just read over this column and realize there is enough anger and contempt in it to fill any three City Council meetings. This is not my usual style anymore; I have become mild-mannered and rather sweet in both my personal and public life.

But the cab problem at O`Hare (and in the neighborhoods) is so personal and easy to solve and so hurtful to the old city--not to mention to hard-working cab drivers who actually know where State and Madison is--that I think it is worth one more shot. What do you think?